Should we be concerned that the good response is the only one that won't get you published?

From XKCD

If ever the road to political hell was paved with reformers' good intentions...

Not  surprisingly,  Michael Hiltzik has the essential explanation of how we got here.

Herbert Croly, one of the nation’s leading progressive political commentators, cautioned that progressive electoral reforms such as the recall and ballot initiative would be “instruments of minority rule and usually of the rule of a very small minority.”

Enacted in response to the “flagrant betrayal of the popular interest” that took place under the traditional political system, Croly wrote, these measures “may succeed in abolishing one kind of abuse and oppression, but only at the price of its being succeeded by other kinds.”

...

The year was 1914. Only three years before Croly’s warning, California had established the recall, initiative and referendum as tools of “direct democracy” at the behest of its newly elected progressive governor, Hiram Johnson.

In his 1911 inaugural speech, Johnson asserted that the three measures would “place in the hands of the people the means by which they may protect themselves.”

He meant protecting themselves from the abuses of the dominant political force in California of that era, the Southern Pacific Railroad. The SP had suborned almost every other instrument of political action: It chose candidates for public office and manipulated the vote to make sure they were elected.

...

Johnson had won the governorship through a head-on attack on the SP in a statewide campaign; now that he was in office, he intended to break its political monopoly forever.

Those who counseled caution in reforming the political system were shouted down by reformers, who were in their ascendance and had the depredations of the SP to point to.

...

As historian Tom Sitton observed, [reformer John Randolph] Haynes was confident that the reforms would inspire voters to “become informed enough on political issues to cast a ballot” on specific issues. Haynes “saw in these instruments a method by which groups with little power could ... compete with a plutocracy that he believed had corrupted American politics at every level.” With Haynes’ backing, the reforms were enacted overwhelmingly in Los Angeles in 1902.

...

Croly saw that the initiative would play to the interests of the most determined camp and that a motivated and vocal minority would often have the advantage over an indifferent majority.

“The right to force a vote on specific legislative projects ... which must be approved or disapproved as a whole,” he wrote, “places an enormous power in the hands of a skillful and persistent minority.”

Self-cons and lies of obfuscation

Finally got around to reading the Big Short. (An actual physical-not-virtual book printed on paper, just like in the before times.) Lots to talk about here, but this section struck me as particularly relevant to some of our recent conversations.  

On one level, Lewis knows this isn't exactly true. Though the industry did its damnedest to confuse and conceal what was actually going on, the deception was never that effective. Despite all the repackaging and misdirection, the truth wasn't that hard to see, at least not for those who were interested in the truth.

The complexity of the instruments didn't lead the trader to deceive himself; they let him. While Burry and Eisman were extremely intelligent and diligent investors, but what really set them apart was, to steal one from Orwell, their willingness to see what was in front of their noses while almost everyone else refused to.

The meltdown of 2008 was perhaps the largest self-con ever with the financial sector losing something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a trillion dollars on the worthless securities it had created, but it was far from the first time a scam artist had bought his own spiel. 

“Teslas are running into stationary objects. They shouldn’t be.”

One of the keys to the success of Elon Musk has been his ability to work the regulators, bullying, playing the martyr, suggesting (directly or through proxies) that agencies like the SEC, the FAA, OSHA, the NHTSA et al. hate progress and are trying to stop him from saving the world (you think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not).

The tactics had been extraordinarily successful, perhaps in part due to the Trump administration’s lax attitudes toward regulation. It’s possible that the election made some kind of reckoning inevitable, particularly given the news about battery fires (not just a Tesla problem) and the misrepresentation of the “Full Self-Driving” option (very much a Tesla problem).

Russ Mitchell writing for the LA Times

In theory, identifying and avoiding stationary objects set off by hazard cones or flashing lights ought to be one of the easiest challenges for any autonomous-driving or driver-assist system.

Yet at least 11 times over the past seven years, cars made by Tesla Inc. and running its software have failed this test, slamming into emergency vehicles that were parked on roads and highways. Now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants to know why.

A federal investigation announced Monday involves Tesla cars built between 2014 and 2021, including models S, X, 3 and Y. If the probe results in a recall, as many as 765,000 vehicles could be affected.

The 11 crashes at issue resulted in 17 injuries and one death. Three took place in Southern California.

The new investigation indicates that the safety agency, under President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, is paying more attention to automated driving safety than the more laissez-faire Trump administration. In June, NHTSA ordered automobile manufactures, including Tesla, to forward data on crashes involving automated systems to the agency.

It’s about time, said Alain Kornhauser, director of the self-driving car program at Princeton University. “Teslas are running into stationary objects,” he said. “They shouldn’t be.”

…

Tesla is also under review by the California Department of Motor Vehicles for its marketing of “Full Self-Driving” technology. That’s a significant enhancement to Autopilot that allows the car to be driven on city streets, with the claimed ability to handle traffic signals and make turns at intersections. The feature costs $10,000, which includes future enhancements, but Tesla has noted that its Full Self-Driving does not make the car self-driving. DMV regulations prevent auto manufacturers from making false claims about automated driving capabilities.

"Why does he mean more to you than us?”

I come from the buckle of the Bible belt and I stay in touch with friends from back home. Nothing here is that new to me, but even if you've heard this story before, this retelling is worth your time. 

What I want to single out here is the way that MAGA and other movements can use members' deeply held (and often reasonable) beliefs to bring them in and then, once they are completely immersed, indoctrinate them into a new worldview that often directly contradicts some of those initial beliefs. This is not a simple process. It happen slowly and stealthily and its effectiveness is not limited to the stupid or the gullible. I've seen smart, reasonable people -- the last ones you'd expect -- get sucked in.  

Of course, more often it is the first ones you'd expect, cruel and foolish people with longstanding reactionary tendencies. The closer to the door they start, the easier it is to get them in the temple, but even the most likely recruits are changed by the indoctrination, made less empathetic, more childish, more paranoid and yet more credulous.   

From the Washington Post:

Like other families with split political affiliations, they had some yelling matches after Trump took office, especially over the former president’s immigration policies. Claire was a Canadian-born Catholic drawn to the Republican Party by her fierce opposition to abortion, and Trump had won her over with promises to champion her position. Celina, Laurie and their three younger siblings skewed left despite their conservative upbringing in South Dakota. They had never felt such disdain for a politician before.

By the end of the Trump administration, the bounds of their political disagreements had shifted, Laurie recounted, becoming at once more intense and also less about policy and legislation in Washington. They had learned to live with their disagreements over abortion. Now it felt like they were occupying different realities altogether.

Over the course of 2020, amid a presidential election, racial justice protests and a pandemic, the five siblings began to trade increasingly worried text messages and emails about some of the things Claire was saying and posting on Facebook. There were comments they noticed about child trafficking and sacrifice, a key theme of the extremist QAnon ideology. There was her vitriol toward Pope Francis, whom she had referred to as “the anti-Pope.” After Election Day, they took turns pushing back on a stream of disinformation Claire posted online, including the unfounded claim that the CIA murdered U.S. soldiers abroad to help cover up voter fraud.

...

“Why is this important enough to compromise your relationships with your kids? Why does he mean more to you than us?”

This is a topic that could launch a thousand graduate theses, so we need to come back to it, particularly what happens to an area when conservative media reaches critical mass (we will cover this). In the mean time, one closing thought: cults and cons exist because people believe they would never fall for a cult or a con.

Ten years ago at the blog -- Conservation of Cynicism

 

It's all really the same thread. Back in 2011, we were talking about the consequences of the conservative movement cultivating craziness and manipulating the base through disinformation. We just have more examples now. 

SUNDAY, JULY 31, 2011

Overly-trusting Straussians

There is a strong strain of Straussianism in the conservative movement. Of course, not all prominent conservative intellectuals believe that you have to lie and oversimplify to move the masses in the best direction for society, but pretty much all have accepted and, more importantly, internalized the fact that many of their colleagues do believe in the need for these noble lies.

Once you've internalized the idea that people in your circle are smart and sane but occasionally make ludicrous statements for the benefit of the crowds (call it the Elsinore strategy -- feigning madness), it becomes easy to ignore craziness in your own party, particularly when there's a penalty for suggesting the alternative (see Bartlett and Frum).

In other words, we have something like conservation of cynicism. The Straussian assumes the worst about the masses, but has an excuse to assume the best about allies, even when they give every indication of being crazy and/or stupid. The result is that it has taken smart, sane conservatives far too long to acknowledge what's going on with House Republicans.

The consequences of this lack of cynicism is spelled out in detail in excellent posts by Jon Chait and Paul Krugman.

To quote Robin Williams, "Does the name Custer mean anything to you?" -- more on feral disinformation and sane vampires

We've already done a couple of posts (here and here) on this, but a recent post at TPM got me to thinking that I hadn't emphasized enough how difficult this situation is for the Republicans.

Here's the relevant section from our original post.

Disinformation has gone feral when:

1. It is no longer in the control of the group that created it.

2. It has continued to grow in popularity and influence.

3. It has started to evolve in such a way that the nuisance/threat it presents is as as great to the people who created it as it does to the original targets. 

The most prominent example of the moment is the right wing movement opposing covid vaccines and increasingly vaccination in general. 

The Conservative Movement spent decades depicting the scientific establishment as alarmist and corrupt because undermining it served a clear political purpose at the time. Recently this narrative took on an added usefulness as the Republicans tried to contain the fallout from the pandemic. It was an unspeakably evil position to take, greatly adding to a horrific death toll, but it had a certain ends-justify-the-means logic, "had" being the operative word.

In 2021, being the anti-vaxx party is not in the Republicans' best interest. It devastates  areas that voted for Trump and it makes the most comically crazy people imaginable the face of the GOP. On top of that, it's bad for business. 

The best messaging for the Republicans at this point would be to start referring to the "Trump vaccines" and to work the phrase "Operation Warp Speed" into every statement and interview response, regardless of topic, then take credit for the end of the pandemic. That is, however, not an option. Control of the narrative has been lost, Things have gone feral.

Though the Conservative Movement reaped considerable benefits for decades by cultivating paranoia and conspiracy-thinking, the Republicans are now far past the cunning scheme phase on this. 

Here's Josh Marshall:  

Among Americans over the age of 18 fully 71% have gotten at least one vaccine dose.

As an epidemiological matter we need all that 71% to get both their shots. Currently that fully vaccinated number is 61%. And that should shift significantly over the next few weeks as many of those people get their second shots and then wait for two more weeks for the full immune effect to take hold. But as a proxy for being for or against vaccines, even the single shot is a good measure. And that means that an overwhelming majority of the people who participate meaningfully in the national political conversation and have even the right to vote are vaccinated.

This becomes even more the case when you add in the age factor. Voter participation almost universally goes up with age. The same is true with COVID vaccines. 90% of Americans over 65 have had at least one shot. And in basically every age segment from age 12 on up the vaccination rate gets higher. Point being, among the voting public the vaccinated already overwhelmingly outnumber the unvaccinated.

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday about how vaccination status is increasingly dividing Americans. “From family gatherings to weddings to workplaces, vaccinated Americans are drawing new, sharper lines around who they choose to spend time with amid the rise of the highly-transmissible Delta variant. And the unvaccinated are growing testy over being excluded and feeling judged for exercising their right to make their own health choices.”

At the risk of over simplifying, we have about two thirds of the country more and more annoyed and even angry at around one quarter who in turn are burrowing even deeper into their long-standing persecution complexes, with the imbalance almost certain to grow and the emotions to intensify. The sane vampires of the GOP face an insurmountable challenge on vaccines. They know how unpopular the con position is but they also know that, as a small tent party, they can't afford to alienate the lunatic fringe they cultivated. 

Interestingly, one result has been, contrary to stereotype, conservative outlets like the WSJ suggesting we should be more sensitive to the feelings of the unvaccinated while the position on the left is increasingly "stop being a baby and get your goddamn shot." I'm absolutely convinced the sane vampires would like to say this too, but their window for being honest with the base has long since closed. 

America has a children of famous parents problem

I've been meaning to repost this for a few weeks now, ever since I saw a Twitter exchange between Ben Dreyfuss and Josh Barro whining about train travel (Barro also had a let them eat cake comment about public libraries, but I'm not sure it was part of the same thread). I was familiar with Barro, an unimpressive writer whose rapid success would be pretty much unimaginable for someone without big time family connections. ("[Robert] Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas, Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent.") Dreyfuss, though, has him beat. First his father Richard Dreyfuss set him up as an actor, then when that didn't work out, his sister got him a job as a professional tweeter.

Just to keep things in perspective, these two are, at worst annoying. The Cuomo brothers are despicable and in terms of damage done, G.W. Bush is in a category of his own. These men didn't just get a leg up; they have traveled their entire lives on greased skids. There are far too many other examples. We have a nepotism problem.

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. While people like Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda, Randy and Thomas Newman,  Chris Wallace and Maggie Haberman certainly had an advantage starting out, their subsequent work suggests that, with a little luck, they might have had roughly the same careers without the same parents. 

Obviously, in a perfect world, we'd all have an equal shot, but as long as connections are merely helpful, we can live with the unfairness. When being born in the right place and knowing the right people becomes a sufficient condition for success, we're in trouble. 

From back in 2014, we had an exchange with Gelman on the topic. 

MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 2014

Are we becoming more tolerant of nepotism (and other perks of privilege)?

The New Republic has a very good profile by Julia Iofee of  Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation. The whole thing is worth reading, but there's one paragraph I'd like to single out both because of its content and its placement deep in the article.

After [Michael] Needham graduated from Williams in 2004, Bill Simon Jr., a former California Republican gubernatorial candidate and fellow Williams alum, helped Needham secure the introductions that got him a job at the foundation. Ambitious and hard-working, he was promoted, in six months, to be Feulner’s chief of staff. According to a former veteran Heritage staffer, Needham is intelligent but “very aggressive”: “He is the bull in the china closet, and he feels very comfortable doing that.” (“I consider him a friend,” says the college classmate, “but he’s a huge asshole.”) In 2007, Needham, whose father has given generous donations to both Rudy Giuliani and the Heritage Foundation, went to work for Giuliani’s presidential campaign. When the campaign folded, Needham followed his father’s footsteps to Stanford Business School and then came back, at Feulner’s bequest, to run Heritage Action.

You'll notice Iofee goes out of her way to suggest that Needham got his first rapid promotion by being "ambitious and hard-working," and there is, no doubt, some truth in that, but pretty much everybody who goes to work for a big-time D.C. think tank is ambitious and hard-working. These are not traits that would have set Needham apart while being the socially well-connected son of a major donor very well might have.

My question is: would this angle have been handled differently a few years ago? Obviously nepotism and advancement through connection have always been with us, but until recently I get the impression that this career path was seen as somewhat suspect; people who obviously got their positions thanks to string-pulling were put on a kind of public probation until they had proven themselves.

Now, the public (or at least the press) seems to me much less likely to discount the accomplishments of the well-connected children of the rich and powerful. Along similar lines, though you can certainly still find jokes about the boss's son/nephew/brother-in-law, but they don't seem nearly as pervasive as they were through most of the 20th Century. Anyone else see a trend here?

They literally call these "pump and dumps"

No, really. They actually use those words. The victims know exactly what's going to happen but never imagine it will happen to them. Never has Maurer's The Big Con seemed so relevant.

Autogyros were cool

And we haven't done a flying machine post for ages.

The technology was still cutting when this film was shot in 1931.






You Only Live Twice was perhaps the stupidest of the series, with the "let Bond go so we can kill him later" tactic reaching possibly a franchise peak. It is also, if you catch it in the right mood, a lot of fun, with piranha tanks, ninjas, and perhaps the most over-the-top Ken Adam set design.

Like the rocket belt in Thunderball, the Wallis WA-116 Agile in YOLT was the real thing, flown by its inventor, Ken Wallis. The armaments are goofy and the doubling leaves something to be desired, but how often do you get to see aerial combat with a genuine autogyro?   

For some reason completely unrelated to the rest of the post, this classic science fiction story came to mind

"The Marching Morons" by Cyril M. Kornbluth is a 1951 story about a con man who suckers gullible people into a doomed flight to another planet.

_____________________________________________________________

For the weekend, three videos from the Common Sense Skeptic.


I assume everyone still remembers Mars One, the widely reported plan to use a reality show to finance a permanent Martian colony. The Gateway SpacePort is also a plan for establishing a privately funded foothold in space, but it's not as reputable or well thought-out.

Running track in @SpaceX BF Spaceship will look something like this pic.twitter.com/563upTfV58

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 8, 2018

The 2001 tweet was one of those reminders that Elon Musk doesn't have a grasp of even the basics of manned space travel. We discussed some of the issues here but this video (also by the Common Sense Skeptic) explains the problems better and in much greater detail.




Even if the orbital hotels and the artificial gravity don't work out, space travel can still be luxurious.

Elon Musk, whose firm SpaceX is building a rocket that could transport up to 100 people in space at once, has a vision for future space activities. On Wednesday, the CEO shared an image with his 31 million Twitter followers envisioning a musical performance in a ship above the Earth.

"Starship Concerto in Zero G," Musk wrote alongside the image, referring to the name of the stainless steel rocket currently in the prototype phase. It wouldn't be the first musical performance in space – Chris Hadfield famously covered David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on board the International Space Station – but the Starship could represent an opportunity for more artists than ever to be inspired by the amidst the stars.
...

Those passengers would have plenty of room to stretch out and get creative. The Starship is expected to offer 100 cubic meters of pressurized cabin space, similar to an Airbus A380 or the International Space Station. Musk noted at a September 2019 event that, thanks to zero gravity, space could be used much more efficiently as users would be able to take advantage of every corner of a room.

Europe envy

This is Joseph

One thing that I always find intriguing is how much people seem to point to European countries as examples of better places to live as compared to North America. The envy of Scandinavia is long standing and people from the UK are seen as being classy but recently there seems to a new target: Hungary. 

As a person who has traveled to Europe a fair bit, I always find this attitude a bit odd. Now, this is not to say that I do not have interest in stealing good ideas from other places (wearing masks for people with active respiratory illness as a matter of social politeness is an idea I would love to steal from Japan). 

That said, there are always two points to keep in mind.

One, it depends a lot on who you are as to whether a specific system is better for you. If you are an immigrant you are better off seeking to live in Canada than Hungary, at least on average, in terms of acceptance. If you have no money and health issues, then maybe you want to live in a place like Canada or the UK which have decent free health care. But if you are sick and have money then I want to be in France -- even libertarians agree. 

Two, is that it depends a lot on social class. People who have the resources to visit Europe and who are able to move around the globe are likely upper middle class. I think it is obvious that the best place to be upper middle class, assuming you stay upper middle class, is probably the United States. Even the arguments about the poor climate seem to presume that people have yet to visit California.  

That said, I take Matt's point that which European country that people envy is a great way to get a sense of what is or is not valued. Not a universal point, preferences can be eccentric. But I always figured that the UK class system is what people in Canada envied -- liking the idea of social hierarchy that is a lot less present in Canada, despite the overall great standard of living in Canada. I would find envy of Russia concerning unless it was envy of something that was a very specific value (e.g., winter sports or cuisine). 

In any case, it has been fun to watch the defenses of Hungary, There are some really nice features about Hungary but I am still pretty convinced the best place in the world to be middle class is still the United States. Certainly, the pattern of immigration suggests the same. 

The good news is I can run it again since nothing has changed. The bad news is I can run it again since nothing has changed -- Mega-fire repost 3

 TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

West Coast wildfires -- Marketplace gets it right

At first glance, this shouldn't be that difficult. You just have to hit the following points clearly and emphatically.

1. While climate change contributes to the wildfire crisis, the much larger and more immediate cause is the result of decades of excessive Western fire suppression.

2. We desperately need to address this crisis as soon as possible, primarily through controlled and managed burns.

3. The scientists studying forests are in absolute agreement on both these points and have been warning us about this crisis for years.

4. However, a combination of governmental inaction, perverse incentives and the short-sighted self-interest of various parties has kept us from avoiding catastrophe.

Not one in ten articles on the subject meets these standards, but perhaps we shouldn't be that surprised. Telling a story that grows out of the facts, fighting the urge to bend it to fit popular narratives, keeping the focus on the genuinely important. These are things that require journalists to have both skill and courage.

Which is part of the reason why Marketplace is the best daily news show on public radio.

The good news is I can run it again since nothing has changed. The bad news is I can run it again since nothing has changed -- Mega-fire repost 2

 

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

"California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire"

The sky here in LA has taken on that distinct orange tint. Just as the heat has started to let off, the air is turning bad. Another large fire has broken out in the Angeles Forest. [Emphasis added]

The rugged terrain, access and triple-digit temperatures created difficult and dangerous conditions for firefighters. During a Monday afternoon press conference, officials expressed concern that winds in the coming days would change the direction of the flames, pushing them down the mountains toward foothill communities in the San Gabriel Valley.

If that happens, authorities said the communities that would impacted first would be Monrovia and Duarte. Residents in those areas are being urged to be prepared to evacuate. Bradbury, Azusa, Arcadia and Sierra Madre could also potentially see either evacuation warnings or orders.

"Directly coming into Monrovia or Duarte, no, that area has not burned in 50 to 100 years in some places, so the fuel-loading is high and there is not a natural break from the fuels from previous fires," said incident commander Steve Goldman.

As Elizabeth Weil explains in her Pulitzer-worthy Propublica piece (which we discussed earlier here), this is not just a dangerous but an unnatural situation. [again, emphasis added]

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

...

[Deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”

The good news is I can run it again since nothing has changed. The bad news is I can run it again since nothing has changed -- Mega-fire repost 1

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2020

The truth about Western megafires is the narrative no one wants to hear.

Every few years, some journalist will do a solid, deeply reported story on Western megafires. (This Propublica piece by Elizabeth Weil is excellent. I also recall a good series from NPR a while back.) These articles always say basically the same thing about the scientific consensus, the severity of the problem and the steps we need to take. They are always persuasive, always told with a great sense of urgency, and always ignored. This is what happens, at least these days, when a crisis and its solutions break with conventional narratives and  require great political will to address.

The doomed California genre plays both to very real environmental concerns and to a longstanding Eastern schadenfreude, the epicenter of which is located in the editorial offices of the New York Times. The Golden State is supposedly burning for its environmental sins but in reality this is not primarily a climate change story. While increased heat and more severe droughts exacerbate the situation, we would still be having megafires without them.

A seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.

Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.

Fires are an essential part of the life cycle of these forests. Controlled burns return the forests to a more normal equilibrium. If we listened to the scientific consensus, they would be the main weapon in our arsenal. Unfortunately science is not the main consideration here.

By comparison, planning a prescribed burn is cumbersome. A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.

“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke. Historical accounts of California summers describe months of smoky skies, but as a feature of the landscape, not a bug. Beasley and others argue we need to rethink our ideas of what a healthy California looks like. “We’re used to seeing a thick wall of even-aged trees,” he told me, “and those forests are just as much a relic of fire exclusion as our clear skies.”

 

In the Southeast which burns more than twice as many acres as California each year — fire is defined as a public good. Burn bosses in California can more easily be held liable than their peers in some other states if the wind comes up and their burn goes awry. At the same time, California burn bosses typically suffer no consequences for deciding not to light. No promotion will be missed, no red flags rise. “There’s always extra political risk to a fire going bad,” Beasley said. “So whenever anything comes up, people say, OK, that’s it. We’re gonna put all the fires out.” For over a month this spring, the U.S. Forest Service canceled all prescribed burns in California, and training for burn bosses, because of COVID-19.

In my more pessimistic moments, I think we are in a post-solution America, a country that talks a better and better game but has lost its taste for actually solving problems. Lately, those pessimistic moments have become more frequent.